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Common Responsibility
The success or failure of Vatican II cannot be judged merely by the bulk of written documents. More important is the spirit that brought the council together and inspired its discussions. The most apparent impact of those discussions was the bishops' self-discovery of their common responsibility for the church as a whole. By working together, says Dr. John K. S. Reid, an observer from the World Alliance of Reformed and Presbyterian Churches, "the council has enabled the Roman Catholic Church to form a common mind. At the first session nothing was decided. In the final session, a real consensus had grown up."
This consensus, Reid adds, acknowledged the insights of thinkers who, before the council, were considered almost an underground minority—such as U.S. Jesuit John Courtney Murray, whose theories on church-state relations provided background for the religious-liberty statement. In the wake of this progressive victory has come what Dominican Edward Schillebeeckx of Nijmegen University calls "the triumph of anti-triumphal ism"—the rejection by the council of the world-hating, anathema-hurling Counter Reformation conviction that Catholicism alone possessed the truth of life. In contrast to past councils, which devoted much of their time consigning to eternal flames those who did not agree with majority decisions, Vatican II issued no such condemnations. On the floor of St. Peter's, Vienna's Franzis-kus Cardinal Konig argued that the church has much to learn from the world, even from atheism.
In stating what the church today believes, the bishops sometimes found fresh, nontraditional language that escaped from what Italian Bishop Jolando Nuzzi calls "the Western mortgage" on scholastic theology. By way of evidence, Bernard Haring, a German Redemptorist theologian, cites what happened to On Divine Revelation. "The first text intended to define precisely the declaration of faith by excluding as many thoughts from today's theology as possible," he says. "The style was abstract, negative. The final draft tries to avoid any uncertain declaration, and thus leaves room for further research and dialogue."